Although David Fincher couldn’t have known while in the long preproduction phase of Mank that a sinister disease called COVID-19 was brewing to help take out the final vestiges of the Old Hollywood model (namely, distribution to movie theaters), he surely was already aware on some level that the death was imminent. After all, this is the man who declared, “Unless you’re making a tentpole movie that has a Happy Meal component to it, no one’s interested.” He has never been a fan of the “studio system.” But Fincher has always been one of those rare modern day auteurs who has defied the standard template of what the industry “expects” if one is going to be successful within it. If it sounds just a bit like Mank himself, you wouldn’t be wrong. “Mank,” of course, refers to the nickname of the leviathan screenwriter that was Herman J. Mankiewicz. Dead at fifty-five (not bad for a raging alcoholic), the Hollywood by way of Brooklyn (as was the case for most back then who weren’t coming straight off the boat from Eastern Europe) screenwriter single-handedly shaped what audiences saw and heard in the films of the 1930s.
There was perhaps a certain kismet element to Mank’s release happening now, as there were plans to make it in the 90s (studios, naturally, were averse to Fincher’s insistence on filming it in black and white). And yet, the belt-tightening era of the Great Depression has never been more relevant than it is in the present. It would have only been out of place in the economic boom of the Clintonian decade (though at least it would have meant the odious Lily Collins could not have been cast in yet another two-dimensional role, though obviously slightly more depth-laden than Emily of Emily in Paris). No, everything about Mank screams that it was destined for the here and now, most especially because it is a sort of elegy for what filmmaking once represented. “Art for art’s sake” (“Ars gratia artis”), that was the motto at MGM. It didn’t take Mankiewicz long to unveil what a crock of shit that was as MGM started to focus increasingly on the musical schlock that made it a household name.
Fincher, in casting Gary Oldman as the disgruntled and “washed up” writer (despite creating his greatest work at his most washed up), also dares to poke at the fragile wound of #MeToo and the overall “cancel culture” that has become associated with it. For, lest we forget, Oldman’s domestic assault charge came up in the wake of the 2017 reckoning that positioned Harvey Weinstein as the primary head of the sexual assault Hydra in Hollywood. Regardless, Oldman still won for Best Actor in Darkest Hour at the 2018 Academy Awards. And just as the industry declared itself as being freshly woke with the additional slogan, “Time’s Up.” It’s the sort of garden variety Hollywood hypocrisy Mank would have balked at, but of course, not been the least bit surprised by. As for Fincher, his rebellious tendency against tailoring himself to the evermore “liberal” yet right-wing in militancy muzzle of the moviemaking game has found him pondering the idea of creating a series centered on cancel culture (will Bret Easton Ellis write one of the teleplays?).
This notion of politics and Hollywood being volatilely and inextricably aligned appears heavily in Mank, with the narrative thread of Upton Sinclair (played, of all people, by Bill Nye) running against Frank Merriam in the 1934 elections serving as a greater allegory for Mank’s own hopeless fight against the corporate juggernaut that is MGM–nothing more than a front for the financial and personal machinations of a certain newspaper mogul. Run by Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard), well-known stooge to said newspaper mogul, William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), both men want Merriam’s win as governor to be secured for their own economic purposes.
With Sinclair gaining notable ground on the campaign trail, an off-handed comment by Mank to Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley), “Boy Wonder” of a producer, leads to the production of a number of fake propagandist newsreels (Nazi Germany, anyone?) designed to discredit Sinclair as nothing more than an insidious communist. This, too, might be one way to describe Mank, an indefatigable toiler for the “little man,” even as he made his fortunes from a capitalist industry he grew to despise (this, too, is the constant inner battle between “the artist” and “the artist who still wants to make money like everybody else”). Yet it was he who brought out the “literati” of New York as the “talkies” required more writers. He who invoked the underpaid and overworked average joe writer to help them cull their own fortunes from an industry still in its infancy, therefore more easily manipulable to one’s favor. He who tried his best to help Hollywood sustain some air of intelligence before it entirely dumbed itself down, and the audience along with it. In underestimating the “Fartland” (that means “Heartland” America) early on, Hollywood systematically aided in dismantling any threshold the moviegoer might have for literary screenplays (with the likes of Fitzgerald and Faulkner surrendering to sentences in service of the medium at various points throughout the Golden Age). So it is that Mank tells the man responsible for directing the phony reels that aid Merriam’s victory, “We have to be vigilant [in regards to] people sitting in the dark willingly checking their disbelief at the door. We have a huge responsibility.” It would seem that most working in H’wood have lost sight of that.
Some argued Pauline Kael lost sight of such responsibility. For she was the revered film critic (also recently resuscitated in I’m Thinking of Ending Things via a diatribe based on her review of A Woman Under the Influence) whose controversial 1971 essay, Raising Kane, revived the speculation as to who the “true author” of Citizen Kane’s script was. In Mank, her theories appear more than vindicated despite being widely maligned and discredited. And it bears noting that Fincher’s patriarch, Jack, was in the firmly anti-Welles camp regarding his thoughts on the authorship. Thus, Mank, as Jack Fincher’s sole writing credit, has garnered him and Mank the posthumous glory both likely always craved from “the biz” while still alive. And now, Jack’s son has secured it for them by being as grandiose with plot depiction as he wants to be. Here you have a biopic about a titan, himself writing a biopic about a titan. It doesn’t get more meta than that. But then, Fincher has always been one for the concept within a concept mind fuck.
He toys with Hollywood and hopes that one day they’ll be on his intellectual playing field. It would seem they still don’t quite get it, for as he openly rails against everything they stand for, in true Hollywood fashion, even to land a cover on something like Total Film, the writers felt obliged to oversimplify the movie with the headline, “David Fincher’s Love Letter to Citizen Kane.” But it’s so much more than that. Citizen Kane is almost secondary to the plot that truly drives the movie: Mank’s unremitting desire to tell the truth–the brutal, unvarnished truth that Hollywood has consistently muzzled and money constantly buries. That, to him, has become the ultimate vendetta against the likes of William Randolph Hearst and Louis B. Mayer. And, to the point of writing as a vendetta against those who should have acted better, well, it’s only become all the more taboo over time. In fact, when was the last time anyone really took someone down with a written (yet “stylized”) account of the truth after having been a trusted “interloper” of an “elite” group? Probably when Truman Capote released chapters of Answered Prayers in Esquire. Maybe that was the last time the written word bore any final semblance of clout anyway–in the 1970s-era pages of Esquire. Because we all know the 1980s signaled one of the most palpable shifts in twentieth century cinema: that which favored the blockbuster. Movies that were franchisable as a sort of additional way for America’s deftness for “capitalism as art” to be thrown in the U.S.S.R.’s face.
So it was that the likes of Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, E.T., Star Wars and Indiana Jones were the top-grossing box office draws of the decade. Had Mank remained alive to see it, one can only imagine the snarky comment he would have on hand. This isn’t to scorn what the 80s heralded–for there is no arguing that the Decade of Excess was among the rifest for iconic pop culture. But it is to say that this was when the seismic shift toward low-brow culture was firmly solidified. In the 60s and 70s, the notion of bona fide indie filmmaking was still in full swing–a mild consolation for those who were in mourning over the Death of Glamour that occurred when the veneers of the studios were stripped down. Now you had Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, former glamor queens of rival studios, freely parading their decrepitude on screen. What had the world come to, the classicists wondered. But What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? would be nothing compared to the horrors of myth-dismantling still to come.
Perhaps, in some ways, Mank would have been a champion of the modern filmmaking model. At least it dispensed with the facade. Except, instead, in place of this form of whitewashing has cropped up a new one: that of the Faux Woke For Profit. Must cater to the political sensibilities of the audience if we’re to graft any “membership” from them. Yes, it’s all about subscribers now, not “moviegoers.” And even that word, “subscriber,” connotes that those participating must subscribe to what they’re being sold. Must buy into the false idea that they have an endless plethora of choice when, in fact, the suit-wearing man behind the Wizard of Oz (Mank wrote that too, by the way) curtain is still manipulating everything. He’s just doing it in a way that makes us believe we have the control.
What’s more, Mank makes another Netflix-sanctioned homage to Old Hollywood, Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood, look like utterly pandering, revisionist garbage (gar-bah-juh, pronounced with French accent). Here, Fincher is willing to get as far down in the muck as Sinclair to explore the sordid bowels of Hollywood history, and how, while ample time has passed and the movie industry has been given numerous face lifts since its genesis, its song remains the same. And let this would-be screenwriter tell you, the chorus is not: “Art for art’s sake.”
